askagamedev

[askagamedev]

When do you think the industry will go back to "normal" and what are some signs that that is going to happen?. I mean, studios stabilizing financially, AAA games franchises not getting canceled anymore, reducing the amount of layouts happening. I just saw the news of EA firing 300+ people and possibly cancelling Titanfall 3. Is there any hope that this is going to get better, or this is already the new normal?

Things will contract until they reach equilibrium. There have been bad times before (most recently the 2007-2012 Great Financial Crisis era) where everything contracted for a while, and eventually things turned around again. The main issue is that the nothing exists in a vacuum. The greater international economic situation is causing significant uncertainty. The tariff situation is only one factor in this - there's was also significant over-investment in games between 2020-2022, which then led to this correction in the total number of sustainable projects and staff, the tech industry at large having a lot of trouble, the global interest rates rising that made it difficult to borrow money and thus try new things, AI threatening to replace human workers, and a thousand other issues.

You've probably noticed that a lot of these cancellations are "incubation" projects. Incubation projects are the new game ideas that aren't going to ship for several years. They're often still in the extremely early stages of development, still figuring out what the core of the game will be, and nowhere near ready to play or even show. When your house is in order and things are good, you can think about how you want to remodel the kitchen or build out a patio. When your house is on fire, those plans for the kitchen remodel are a lot less important.

Things will continue to get worse until we reach a state where things are sustainable again. I have no idea when that will be and I sincerely sympathize with all of the unfortunate victims of the waves of layoffs. Unfortunately, we as individuals lack the ability to affect the international situation very much. All we can do is keep moving forward. We level up, we work on self-improvement, and we try to do better with the opportunities we currently have. Take care of yourselves, we're all in for a bumpy ride for the next few years.

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[askagamedev]

What is your current opinion on Unreal Engine 5? Between Digital Foundry, content creators, and people on social media, everyone appears to be constantly attacking UE5 for performance issues (stuttering, frame rate, etc.). Is this criticism warranted, or is it more a case of developers still getting used to UE5 and its complexities (meaning it will likely improve in time)?

Everything improves with time as the engineers learn the details and optimize their work. This is true of every tech platform ever and won't be any more different with Unreal Engine 5 than it has been with UE4, 3, or anything else. That said... after having very recently worked with UE5 for enough time to get used to some of its foibles and having looked into some core engineering issues in a project utilizing some of the new tech introduced in UE5 (and the caveats and side effects of using that tech), I can say with fair confidence that (some) complaints about the performance issues are definitely warranted. These aren't global to all UE5 projects, but they are major performance issues we ran into and had to solve.

One major issue we ran into was with Nanite. Nanite is the new tech that allows incredibly detailed high poly models, a sort of [LOD system] on steroids. The Entity Component System of the Unreal Engine (every actor is a bag of individual components) allows developers to glom nanite meshes onto just about anything and everything including characters, making it very powerful and quick to stand up various different visuals. However, this also requires significant time spent optimizing that geometry for lighting and for use in game - interpenetrating bits and pieces that don't necessarily need to calculate lighting or normals or shadows unnecessarily add to the performance cost must be purged from those nanite models. Nanite looks great, but has issues that need to be ironed out and the documentation on those issues isn't fully formed because they're still being discovered (and Epic is still working on fixing them). We had major performance issues on any characters we built using nanite, which meant that our long-term goal for performance was actually to de-nanite our characters completely.

Another major issue I ran into was with the new UE5 World Partition system. World Partition is essentially their replacement for their old World Composition system, it's a means of handling level streaming for large contiguous world spaces. In any large open world, you're going to have to have individual tiles that get streamed in as the player approaches them - there's no reason to fit the entire visible world into memory at any given time with all the bells and whistles when the player can only see a small part of it. The World Partition system is supposed to stream in the necessary bits piecemeal and allow for seamless play. Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues with it that are just not documented and/or not fixed yet. I personally ran into issues with navmesh generation (the map layer used for AI pathfinding) using the World Partition that I had to ask Epic about, and their engineers responded with "Thanks for finding this bug. We'll fix it eventually, likely not in the next patch."

Most of these issues will eventually get ironed out, documented, and/or fixed as they come to light. That's pretty normal for any major piece of technology - things improve and mature as more people use it and the dev team has the time and bandwidth to fix bugs, document things better, and add quality of life features. Because this tech is still fairly new, all of the expected bleeding edge problems are showing up. You're seeing those results - the games that are forced to use the new less-tested systems are uncovering the issues (performance, bugs, missing functionality, etc.) as they go. Epic is making fixes and improvements, but us third-party game devs must still ship our games and this kind of issue is par for the course.

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Is more complicated, or more work to write code for The Game EA Sports FC if you were starting from scratch than it would be to write code for any other large scale game, like an MMORPG also done from scratch? Or GTA6 i.e.? (Licensing issues aside)

Code systems are code systems. Good code architecture tends to follow pretty universal principles, regardless of whether the system is governing loot tables or lighting systems. Constructing software systems is about seeing the general rules at work and using those to write code that adheres to those rules.

It really helps to take a larger view of what a game is from a software engineering perspective. A game (or any major piece of software) is a bunch of systems comprised of smaller subsystems, and how those individual systems interact with each other. All code systems all need to do three things:

Determine when the system needs to do its work

Return the processed results from that internal work to external systems that need those results to do their own work

Do their own internal work to process and handle requests correctly

When planning out what a system will do, it helps to divvy up the work into these three buckets. Once you know what the system needs to do, the engineer can break down the individual functions and data members she'll need in order to actually do that work.

Let's move forward with an example - say that I wanted to build a stealth takedown system in my action adventure game. The design document says that I want the player to be behind an unaware enemy, press a button, and then play a paired animation that kills the enemy. Using the three buckets mentioned previously, let's break it down.

When does the system need to do its work?

Player and enemy position

Player and enemy facing direction

Enemy awareness state

Game controller input state

What results do I need to provide?

I need to know when the player meets the conditions of being behind and facing an unaware enemy (call the UI system to show the button prompt)

I need to call the animation system to play the animations on the player and the enemy (call the animation system to play the animation)

I need to kill the enemy (call the damage system to kill the enemy)

What do I need to do the internal work to provide those results?

I need to calculate whether the player is behind the enemy

I need to calculate whether the player is facing the enemy

I need to determine whether the enemy is aware of the player

I need to know when the player presses the attack button

As each of these elements is built and works, we can use them to interact with each other. Logical checks like whether the player is behind the enemy will determine whether the action can be taken. Actions like performing the takedown animations are then attached to the conditions. These combine to form the rules from the designer and a system is born.

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How are RPGs like Bg3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Elder Scrolls, etc that have so many story branches presented to the developers? Is one person in charge of one whole story branch or is it divided into chunks in a way? Does the writers room look an awful lot like Charlie from always sunny?

Narrative in such games are usually a lot more modular and systemic than you think. When you're putting together a narrative for a quest, for example, it's usually [set up in the form of a flowchart] - what happens in what order, where things branch, where they converge, where decisions can be made, and so on. If narrative is a big part of our game, the team usually has some a narrative design tool to help organize all of these things so that individual contributors can all work on different parts of the same narrative at the same time, all while keeping the project stable and functional.

What we're basically thinking about is a system of beats, where the overall narrative is defined as a logical flowchart of individual beats. Each beat thus has its own pre-requisites, internal logic to track player progress and handle item and reward management, and outward-facing variables for other beats to take into consideration (e.g. any decisions made during this beat that might need to be referenced later). Each beat can be worked on separately, which allows different narrative designers to work on different parts of the narrative flow concurrently.

Within a specific beat, we apply logic to determine what happens. If condition X is met, we play this conversation. If condition X is not met, we skip the conversation or maybe play an alternative conversation. These conditions can often be internal or external (e.g. from a previously-completed quest or beat), and are usually as complicated as we have the breadth to make them. After a particular quest or subquest is ready for testing, the narrative designer writes up a test plan for QA to validate the quest - how to start it, how to proceed through it, the different variations on prerequisites, and the expected results given the different player choices and variables going into the quest.

If we didn't have the kind of technical tooling needed to keep things organized, it would probably look a lot like those conspiracy boards. As such, most of this looks a lot more like a flowchart with a lot of clickable fields that allow us to set up conditions, results, dialogues, variables, and so on.

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Just personally speaking, have you been seeing folks laid off from game studios in the past couple years finding work at other studios? Is skuttlebutt out there optimistic or no?

Some have, some have not. Senior devs I know mostly do have jobs - some have left the industry or gone industry-adjacent (e.g. one engineer I know has gone back and forth to and from casino games several times), but they have work. Mid-level and junior devs are a mixed bag - I'd say about half of the ones I know who were laid off recently are still looking and the other half have found something. Most students and grads I know are still looking for their first job.

I would say that right now, the situation is rough. It is possible to find work, but it is definitely nowhere near as easy as it was in 2021-2022 to get a job offer. My own personal metric is how often I get cold calls from recruiters each month. During good times, I get lots of recruiters reaching out. During bad times, the recruiting calls dry up. Right now it's really cold. It isn't absolute zero today, but we're pretty close.

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What makes features make a RPG? e.g. character creation, choice making etc.

I’ve seen a good number of arguments between game fans about what is and isn’t an RPG, but the actual answer might be a bit disappointing. They want to be able to point at a game in an argument and definitively say “That’s not a [insert genre here]!” And they argue about this constantly, when what they are really saying is “I don’t like [insert game here], so I am going to say it is not [insert genre here] in order to make my dislike seem more legitimate.” While a lot of hardcore (and argumentative) players want genres to have a hard and clear set of criteria, the reality is that they aren’t. To understand this, we should go back to where they originally came from. The answer lies in two words: Shelf Space.

In the beginning, long before any kind of digital distribution, video games were sold from wholesalers to retailers and put on the shelves in brick and mortar stores. No matter what you’re selling, be it video games, kitty litter, or shampoo, the retailer will want to put similar things together. That way, the customer will intuitively grasp the similarity and be more likely to buy the products he or she wants. This helps the customers find things, as well as suggests other products to the customer that he or she might like. So this is what began the idea of video game genres. They are roughly categorized onto where they would be sold by a retailer, and they are done pretty haphazardly by employees quickly.

Video games tend to have far too much bleed-over to ever have any real hard classification system. It’d be way too easy to find examples of games that defy any set of established rules you have, which is why most of us on the development side don’t even bother. Instead, we often use a general and simple set of rules to determine whether a game is of a specific genre. This doesn’t preclude a game being part of multiple genres either. We generally leave it up to the retailers to do the final call when they are putting games on shelves. So here are the (rough) general guidelines:

Does it involve shooting enemies or a first-person perspective? Shooter.

Does it involve playing a real-world sport of some kind? Sports game.

Does it have experience points and levels? RPG

Is it online-only? MMORPG/Online game.

Is there manipulation of blocks involved? Puzzle.

Top-down view with lots of little selectable things? Strategy.

Race tracks and vehicles? Racing.

Skybox in first person? Flight sim.

Plastic instrument? Music.

One person on the left fighting another on the right, with health bars up top? Fighting. 

An 80s classic that old people would recognize (e.g. Pac-man, Centipede, Galaga, etc.), or a game with 8-bit aesthetic? Arcade. 

Didn’t fit? Action/Adventure.

And that’s really it. Can games get more than one “yes”? Sure. Most of the time, nobody on the development side really cares. If you want to say your game is an RPG, go ahead. If you want to say it has “RPG Elements”, go ahead. We rarely bother trying to classify things because we know that there are plenty of games that break any hard set of genre rules - and as more games come out, it will continue to do so.

[askagamedev]

Doing this on anon for obvious reasons but is there any chance of getting hired as an entry level game dev in 2025? I've been unemployed for nearly two years since graduating from uni and I'm just getting rejection after rejection from game companies. All the posts are looking for senior devs, team leads, or managers. I have friends who've given up on the industry entirely. Is there any hope? Or am I fighting a losing battle here...

In times of economic difficulty or uncertainty, the number of overall jobs decreases because the number of cancellations rises. New studios do start up, but entry level positions are rare since most of the new studios are looking for funding and they need the core senior dev team to build enough of a prototype to sell the idea to the money people. Were I in your place, I would do two things - I would first widen my search to look for work in adjacent fields where I could train my primary skills, and I would secondly do amateur game dev in my spare time to use as experience as I apply for new jobs.

The first approach is to get a game dev adjacent job. If you're an artist, this could mean illustration, commissions, contract work, or whatever else. Engineering could mean working in simulation software, B2B stuff, graphics, user interface, server engineering, and so on. Producers should focus project management positions and the like. Designers are probably the hardest to find something nearby, a UX designer position or maybe working in training/simulation software or casino games would be a decent fit. Regardless what it is you find, find something to earn some money while you try to get the real job you want.

Secondly, work on your own game dev project in your spare time. Create art assets, build gameplay systems, create game content, do stuff to level up and grow your skills. The self-driven project experience will be noticed on your resume when you apply to positions. We hiring managers want to see that kind of stuff on resumes, especially if you can't find a job in the field. We know that finding a job is hard, we won't hold it against you when we're hiring at entry level.

It's important to remember that entry level work has lots of applicants. Luck plays as large a part in the hiring process as the resume and skills. This could mean that the hiring manager has already selected a candidate or has a candidate further along in the interview process than you at the time of application, or that we already have an offer out for someone, or that the project has changed and the position is a ghost job that the recruiters haven't taken down yet. As such, it's a numbers game - the more shots you take, the more likely you'll get a response (especially if you take the time to [optimize your chances]). If you really want to work professionally as a game dev, you need determination to keep going. Find something to pay the bills, keep doing it in your spare time, and update your resume before firing off a fresh round of applications every six months or so.

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Maybe you can answer this, but if you can't I'd get why. I'm playing the superb Sin & Punishment 64 and I am aware this game was Japan only for 8 years before Nintendo pushed a localization. But even the Japanese original, from what I could find, the game was fully voiced in English. I've noticed a lot of Japanese games do this. I don't mean to imply it's a problem but how come many JP titles, even niche stuff that doesn't make it here, have a lot of English voices/text?

You actually stumbled upon a specific example of a game that was meant to be localized and released in the US, but the localization fell through. Sin and Punishment 64 was developed by Treasure and released in 2000. Treasure already liked using English language for some games - they also recorded Radiant Silvergun (1998) in English.

Treasure had planned for a western localization too - the Nintendo E3 2001 press kit had a small section on N64 games that mentioned how Sin and Punishment was supposed to be shown (with an unknown future), but the localization and western launch unfortunately fell through - likely due in part to the decline of the N64 in popularity by then and Nintendo's heavy push of the Gamecube as the next big thing.

Most of S&P64's contemporary games were primarily in Japanese. You might find some occasional use of English words in games as special move barks (e.g. fighting games) but it's actually pretty rare to find full English voiceover in Japanese games that were never intended to go to western markets from the jump. Japan-only contemporaries like Mother 3, Policenauts, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, Sakura Wars 2, either did Japanese language audio or no voice acting at all. In that regard, Sin and Punishment is a rarity!

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With the announcement of the Switch 2 I was wondering how do games for an older version of a console work on a newer version of the same console? Will they run better from the start or do the devs have to go back and update or unlock something for it to work better?

It depends on how they go to the new platform. There are two main ways of doing this - porting the game project to the new platform or emulating the old game on the new platform.

Porting the game basically means taking the old code and assets and making them run on the new hardware. This involves getting the old game running natively (i.e. the game itself compiles, links, and runs) on the Switch 2. This is usually the choice for newer games and projects - stuff that's more recent usually doesn't rely on obsolete tools or a workflow that is no longer supported. Since we can still use the tools that the game was built with, we (or some contracting studio) can get it working on the new hardware.

Emulating the game means building a virtual machine around the original game that pretends to be the original hardware and modifies the inputs and outputs to and from the game. Emulation is typically done when the game development workflow is no longer feasible - e.g. the game was built with ancient tools on ancient hardware that is no longer supported anywhere. Because we can't modify the original game, we need to build a box around it that we can modify and run the original game within that box. [Click Here] for an an older post that goes into more depth about how virtual machines and emulation work.

The decision on whether to port or emulate is typically driven by what is easiest and most cost-effective. Porting is usually preferred to emulation if available, because it means that the porting team has access to tools, assets, and possibly even the original dev team to answer questions. Emulation means that any gameplay changes tend to be very difficult since rebuilding the original game is probably unfeasible.

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Last time we had a global recession, life style games were barely a thing only in the form of subscription based MMO’s. How do you think modern lifestyle games without subscriptions will fare?

I think that, in times of economic hardship, people tend to tighten their belts and retreat to things that are safe, familiar, and comforting to them. There is also often trading from expensive entertainment (e.g. lavish vacations, theme parks, theater going) to cheaper forms of entertainment (camping, hiking, video games, local attractions, etc.). Similar trends follow in video games - instead of buying Madden or Call of Duty every year, in times of economic hardship you'll see players skipping a year and buying the game the year after. Instead of getting the collector's edition, they'll buy the standard edition.

Free to play lifestyle games get the most out of economic recessions. They have low cost to buy in, but they also have lots of content and plenty of retention mechanics for those who stay to play. They'll typically see a drop in revenue because people have less money to spend, but they'll still see players playing and engaging. In fact, they may even see an uptick in player count because of lapsed players returning to a mostly-inexpensive form of entertainment to replace more expensive options.

Whenever we have economic hard times, players will focus on the entertainment efficiency of their money. They'll compare number of hours of gameplay averaged against the cost of the game, they'll look more towards "good deals", and they'll stick to things they know and trust rather than try new unknown games that might not be winners. Lifestyle games tend to have lots of content, be fairly inexpensive to pick up post-launch, and comforting to lapsed players. These factors make lifestyle games very compelling during economic hard times.

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A common issue with ongoing live service games is that as time progresses, skill designs for new characters necessarily become more complex to differentiate from older characters or to incentivize players to buy them. This sometimes results in things like Fire Emblem Heroes where character skill sheets become page long monstrosities. What are things you can do to maintain the increased complexity without making it seem like a reading assignment?

In times like this, it's good to look back at other long-running games that still run today and how they solved (or at least pushed back on) complexity and power creep.

Magic: The Gathering has been the most popular collectible card game in the world for over three decades. In that time, the publishers have created many tens of thousands of different cards. As such, deck building complexity is potentially off the charts. However, Wizards of the Coast figured out early that keeping multiple game formats, and pushing their main format (standard) as a rotating format. This means that their standard decks are only legal if they are comprised of cards from the latest sets, rather than any card printed since 1993. This rotating format system proved extremely effective at maintaining a consistent power and complexity level for most players - so much so that other collectible card games have adopted a similar approach. Cards above rate on the power or complexity curve can still have their time in the spotlight, and then rotate out such that most players no longer have to deal with them.

World of Warcraft had a similar issue where power and complexity was building at an exponential rate with each expansion pack because every expansion needed to invalidate raid gear from the previous status quo in order to entice players to keep playing. However, since WOW must continue to support all content they've ever released forever, doing some kind of content rotation was not in the cards. Instead, World of Warcraft would introduce the concept of the "stat squish" where power and complexity curves would be flattened - a sort of global scaling down of power to keep the complexity and power of new content from getting too ridiculous. Since old content was, for the most part, only there for achievements and cosmetics and not for actual character progression, the amount of power those old items needed could be squished down with minimal player complaints.

These are two successful methods other long-running games have used to solve their complexity and power creep issues. These are obviously not the only ways to handle this - there is a pretty wide open design space to address this issue. I suspect that FEH will likely eventually need to take some steps to address the complexity and power creep, given the massive power differences between the release units and the current versions. What might some alternative options be for reducing power and complexity for legacy content?

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Do you have any advice for people who are unable to put their experience on their CV because of NDAs?

You can always put your experience on your CV, regardless of NDAs. You shouldn't talk about the specifics of the setting, characters, copyrighted stuff like that, but you should be able to talk generally about the things you did. Just write about what you built, how you built it, and (when asked) talk about the challenges you faced and what you decisions you made.

For example, the last project I worked on is still unannounced. I'm still under NDA on the specifics, but I can still say that I worked on AI combat, on AI navigation, on quest tooling, on spells and abilities, on boss battles, and on scripted quest sequences. I can talk about more specific details about what I did in each of these particular fields, my considerations and tradeoffs, and general stuff about the project - the genre, the kind of tools I used while working on it, and so on.

You can always talk about what work you've done, just focus on keeping it to your own contributions and not about the specifics of the project itself (e.g. IP, release date, features or content you didn't work on, etc.). If you are unsure and willing, feel free to drop in to our discord server or reach out via twitter or bluesky and we can do a CV review.

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On the topic of horror, how do you make a grim subject matter feel silly spookville experience instead of actually scary? For example, the Luigi Mansion games, the Disney Haunted Mansion ride, the Medevil games, etc?

The counter to anything terrifying, off-putting, or grim is cuteness. This is done by exaggerating certain features that humans typically find endearing and downplaying the features that humans find alarming, while keeping the visual recognizable. This works with animals.

It works with the undead.

It works with just about anything.

Humans tend to look at a few things to determine cuteness - the main two being proportion and the removal or masking of traits that we find scary or off-putting.

In terms of proportion, we tend to look favorably on things with the proportions of children, babies especially. Babies have much larger heads relative to their bodies, arms, and legs. If the scary thing is proportioned like a baby or child, we are much more likely to look at it favorably rather than with fear. Most examples of something cute based off of something scary use body proportions closer to a child's body (or the animal equivalent) than an adult's.

Second, we reduce the "fear" factor by simplifying, downplaying, or removing any elements of body horror or things that make people feel uneasy. This typically means any markers of injury, illness, pain, danger, or just obviously unnatural. Notice the mask on the left has many wrinkles in the skin, the unnatural white eyes, the off-putting shading, the heavy emphasis on the yellow teeth and blood-red gums, and the realistic proportions that intentionally push this mask into the uncanny valley for the unease it causes. Now consider the right mask - everything is simplified, with smooth lines and the only sharp edges being on the smile itself. Bright colors, a stylized happy face, with no features that could be considered off-putting.

Combine the use of proportions with the removal of things that induce unease in the viewer, and you get something cute and less scary. This also works in reverse - take something normally cute, change the proportions, and add in the things that induce unease in the viewer and it becomes scary. Artists take advantage of our inherent mental associations with these things to make things cute or creepy.

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Is Gameplay Programmer some form of specialization? I always see people who work as gameplay programmer have some secondary skill, like tools, graphics, etc. In order to create a game you need these guys, but when it comes to layoffs, are they considered high-priority?

Yes, Gameplay Programmer is a specialization. Gameplay Programmers are the engineers who work directly with designers to make the designs actually work in game. This primarily means writing code to make the systems and rules that the designers come up with work.

Gameplay programmer goals tend to be building systems that allow designers to create new content. This often involves building and supporting tools to allow the designers to create, edit, and tune many different individual instances of a specific kind of content - abilities, spells, items, enemies, quests, etc. Thus, a gameplay programmer might build an item editor that would allow an item designer to create many different items. This can scale up to enormous core gameplay-driving systems, like Shadow of Mordor's famous Nemesis system, Prince of Persia's Time Rewind system, or Street Fighter's combat.

Gameplay programmers are not particularly high priority when it comes to layoffs. Engineers tend to be more expensive and marginally more difficult to hire and vet than other fields like QA or production, but gameplay engineers are absolutely not the kind of unicorns like technical artists, engine programmers, graphics programmers, and the like. There's always a need for senior gameplay programmers when it comes to standing a game up at all, but you only need as many gameplay engineers support the designers to build the content that production has scoped.

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[askagamedev]

Previously, you've explained that even with all the high-profile flops recently, lifestyle games with a big investment up-front and ongoing revenue are still the most financially viable projects. Would there be a tipping point in the market where that changes, and smaller and more experimental projects become the more viable strategy?

Sure. If spending on the smaller and experimental projects severely eclipses the spending on the mega franchises, the publishers would take notice and you'd see a lot more of the former. The gaming industry is, unfortunately, very hit-driven. The top 10% of earning games take in ~90% of the total revenue for the entire industry. Work horse franchises like Call of Duty, Pokemon, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Fortnite, Monster Hunter, etc. generally out-earn the experimental and new games by orders of magnitude, even if the new games hit it big. This is why the big publishers behave the way they do during economic bad times. They want to keep things as safe as possible and weather the storm, so they stick to the safest projects (the workhorses) and cancel development on risky projects (experimental and new stuff).

A huge number of people would need to change their buying habits in a significant way for such an industry shakeup to happen. Players would need to go all out for buying risky and new games, rather than continuing to play old and reliable games. When I say all out, I don't just mean a little bit - they need to purchase smaller and experimental games at a rate that is exponentially larger than the buy-in for lifestyle games, likely by a factor of at least 3-4x what they collectively spending on lifestyle games. This would be incredibly difficult, because it would essentially be a complete inversion of the way players currently choose to spend their money. Nothing is impossible, but this is improbable due to fighting against the human instinct to stay safe.

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[askagamedev]

The EU has just banned virtual premium currencies in video games that represent, requiring the games use the actual currency amounts. Thoughts on this new law?

For those who do not understand this change, in the EU any in-game purchase that can be made for paid/premium currency must display the actual cost in local currency to players. Here is my MS Paint mockup of how such a thing would look as required.

The new regulation also requires the conversion rate of premium currency to real money at the baseline exchange rate (e.g. buying the smallest pack of premium currency).

This would have some obvious first-order/immediate results - players would now be able to see how much it would cost them to buy an item outright. This would provide additional friction in direct purchases to players, making them incrementally less likely to purchase items directly.

This would also have some less obvious second-order/derivative results. This also has the side effect of making the more efficient currency bundles look better in comparison, because players can get the premium currency at a discount if they buy those instead of the baseline. It would likely increase engagement by showing that players are earning "value" when they finish quests and obtain premium currency through playing the game by reinforcing that they are obtaining things worth money. I think that the in-game stores will use this to direct players toward better value bundles and packs to buy.

I also think that this would only be the beginning - game designers are clever folks, and we can find many ways to adjust things given a set of constraints. Remember, one of the secondary effects of requiring all gacha games to show the actual percentages was the creation of "pity rates" where continued failed pulls actually incrementally increase the success chances in future pulls. These kind of incentivization changes will continue, including thinking up ways to leverage the "real price" display to make the purchase more appealing. I like to think of it in this way - "just because I can't imagine it myself doesn't mean such a thing can't exist, only that it doesn't exist... yet." If there's a possibility, somebody will probably figure it out.

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[askagamedev]

Does the refund windows of digital stores have any affect on the overall design of a game? If you're expecting Steam to be the main storefront you'll sell on is there an extra drive to hook players within the first two hours?

The main element here is that it kills short games and short form game experiences, because players can play the game through and refund it before the refund window closes. Any short form game experience like that has pretty severe pressure to increase the runtime to avoid getting refunded. Other than that, it doesn't have a huge effect on things. Games have a huge incentive to hook players within the first few minutes, let alone hours, because we must. Generally speaking, the amount of effort a player is willing to put into a game is directly proportional to the cost for that player to obtain that game. When games are hard to obtain, we value them more. When games are easy to obtain, we value them less. Since games have become so easy to obtain, there is a commensurate increase in need to hook players faster.

When I was a child, new games were incredibly rare and difficult to obtain for me. Since I could only purchase a handful of games a year as a child, I spent a lot of effort determining which I would choose and I would spend a lot of time playing them because I wanted to ensure that effort and choice were worthwhile. I spent so much time playing and replaying those games because I wanted to squeeze every last bit of enjoyment I could out of them - even the bad ones. I would be willing to give any new game I got significantly more time before I gave up on it because I lacked other options.

Today there are huge numbers of games available for extremely cheap or free. Steam sales, Epic Game Store giveaways, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, EA Play, bundles, freemium games, and so on are all available. Most are available within minutes or even seconds. This means that there is almost zero cost associated with them to the player - the majority of the cost is the time it takes to install the game and try to play it. Since there is no cost, there is no inherent buy-in or effort the player is willing to put into the game. This means that any game that fails to hook the player within the first few minutes will probably lose the player's interest and the player will move on to the next thing. There is no reason for the player to bother spending the effort to get to the good part.

This is one of the saddest things to me as a dev, because every single game that gets discarded almost immediately for not having a hook within the first few minutes was built by a team who did their best to build a fun and compelling experience, and it means that players can easily miss a game this way that could be really fun and engaging for them. Unfortunately, this is the way the incentives line up and, thus, the expected outcome.

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